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I have been reading around about best practices when doing developing a website. But I am still curious because the answers are found are mostly various, depend on a project's scope and many other considerations.
But just to cut it short, basically I wanted to ask about a proper formatting for 3 main elements in a website.
Header
Main/Body
Footer
How is the structure should be build? Are those three should be wrapped in a container like this:
<div class="wrap">
<div class="header"></div>
<div class="body"></div>
<div class="footer"></div>
</div>
And how is the styling should be done? I saw some people advised to use position:absolute for the CSS, while some others use relative instead. Sorry for the very basic question, but I am really confused about this at this current point of my learning.
The only reason a pseudo-standard like having a lot of wrappers exist is because it has proven useful when creating layouts. Basically it's all there for a reason. If you can design the page you want without having a <div id="mainwrapper"> around it - then you don't need a main wrapper like that. :)
My tip would be to simply start creating a site and try to get it to look like you want using simple elements and CSS styling. If you can't make it work - for example you don't understand how to create a flowing column layout - then just search the web for something like "HTML flow column layout" and go from there.
Edit: "Making it work" usually means not having to result to using tables, a lot of magic numbers and loads of elements to create something simple.
A rule of thumb: Don't cut and paste code/solutions if you don't understand 1) what they do 2) why you need them. It's better to try building it yourself and then, as you work with it, realise why some patterns (clearfix, avoiding tables, floating layouts and so on) are so common. It might not save you time right now, but it definitely will make you a better developer in the long run.
HTML layouts are very subjective and it depends on your requirements / preference as a developer. The two main layouts are static (using absolute positioning etc) and floating (using floated divs for a liquid layout).
This is a good article that covers these principles in more depth
Basically, you should be using block level elements i.e. div tags to structure your page. In cases where you have tabular data tables are perfectly fine, but don't use them for your layout as they're slow to render and can make things difficult when you need full control on your page layout.
Best practice for styling suggests that you use CSS to position and style your elements via class attributes and not inline. This will then allow you to minify your CSS scripts and reduce the overhead of your page. CSS has evolved very well, and there are a lot of selectors available to you to reduce the number of classes in your markup. See CSS selectors at W3C for more information on them.
HTML 5 example. Now a days best Layout width is 960. .content{ width:960px }
<!-- Outer Div -->
<div id="content">
<!-- Inner Content -->
<div id="content-inner">
<!-- header -->
<header>
<div class="header">
<div id="header_wrapper"></div>
</div>
</header>
<!-- body -->
<div id="content-body">
<section></section>
<section></section>
</div>
</div>
<!-- footer -->
<footer>
<div class="footer">
<div id="footer_wrapper"></div>
</div>
</footer>
</div>
When writing HMTL you need to bear in mind readabillity of the markup and the ease with which it can be altered in the future.
Try and bear in mind seperation of concerns. Which parts of your site are related to others in a structural sense and which are not reliant on others. Try and group the reliant elements together (using div's etc.) and keep the unrelated ones apart.
Try and structure your CSS in a similar way, if 2 elements position is reliant on the other, but the other isn't, group the related elements under a single class and then use inheritance to structure the differences. where as the unrelated one should probably be in a separate css class altogether.
Also try and structure your CSS so it can be re-used.
Bit general those points but hopefully it'll help?
There are plenty of sites which offer various SEO friendly layouts and they all provide the css
http://www.searchenginefriendlylayouts.com/
http://www.davidjrush.com/blog/2011/02/seo-friendly-two-column-layout/
http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm
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<div class="navigation header-transparent-light aem-GridColumn--default--none aem-GridColumn aem-GridColumn--default--14 aem-GridColumn--offset--default--0">
Why do classes of a division have all this information? Isn't a class supposed to be simply for allowing a CSS file to target it and customize it on the stylesheet?
This is from line 126 in the homepage page source of www.marcus.com.
And the body starts off with a bunch of div creations.
<div class="root responsivegrid">
<div class="aem-Grid aem-Grid--14 aem-Grid--default--14 ">
<div class="responsivegrid aem-GridColumn--default--none aem-GridColumn aem-GridColumn--default--14 aem-GridColumn--offset--default--0">
<div class="aem-Grid aem-Grid--default--14 ">
<div class="experiencefragment aem-GridColumn--default--none aem-GridColumn aem-GridColumn--default--14 aem-GridColumn--offset--default--0">
What's with all the long class names that are pervasive in large websites?
Disclaimer: I'm just getting started with HTML (3 days in).
Looking at all this for the first time, I ask myself.. "how do they not lose track?"
I think I might be able to shed some light on things here.
Naming conventions in CSS have become an important part of web development over the past decade in an attempt to prevent your styles from "leaking" across your application and to ensure you don't have to write CSS that's overcooked with specificity.
By conforming to a naming convention it should hopefully mean writing styles unique to an element and not battling global styles. BEM is probably the most common convention used but it can lead to massive class names and it can get tricky when to know what to define as a "block".
These days with web components hopefully a lot of these issues are going to disappear. I'd advise reading css-evolution-from-css-sass-bem-css-modules-to-styled-components to get a good understanding of why CSS looks the way it does today and get a sense of where is could be going.
As another little nice to know HTML class names are case insensitive. So whilst you may see pascalCasing in class names typically a class name should be kebab-case ie .global-header instead of .globalHeader.
Just to add to #stwilz excellent answer a short version :
One of the most gruesome tasks in web development is refactoring CSS. Refactoring means that you sometimes want to split or join rules for some scopes.
CSS has no purpose-driven semantics, which means rules are all about the result, there is no way to convey meaning. There is also no scoping, all rules are global. SASS can help to some extent. But largely, you need to use very descriptive class names with some kind of inheritance marking (like the --s you see) so that:
1) Descriptiveness: when you revisit your code a year from now, you can tell why in the world that rule exists, where it applies and how it can be moved or dropped or split and what it will probably affect.
2) Modularity: to prevent rules that are very specific to a scope from leaking global, or even more troubling, from leaking to inner elements, you will usually prefix all rules in that scope with a same prefix. Now, in your design you may decide that a scope needs a -sub and a -sub-sub scope... Imagine, if you will, a programming language where all variable names are global. You would surely use a similar strategy to name them...
some designers create their own framework it's a bit like bootstrap https://getbootstrap.com/ we use this framework to build websites more faster
for example : when we write
<div class="col-md-9 hidden-xs fixed-top text-center"></div>
in the classes above we make the div width 9/12 from the screen width , hidden in mobiles , fixed in screen top and finally the text align center
so some designers create their classes and use them so the classes seem to be complicated but it let them to write less CSS or design a complete website without writing any css only using the classes they have in the framework
currently the best framework is bootstrap because its classes names is easy to learn and it has a lot of features but with time you'll probable create your own framework and you own classes that specific your needs .
i hope that this answer helped you , Have fun :)
As a designer you'll learn separating your CSS code from 'layout' related code to 'typology' related code will allowing for refactoring later when changes are required. Plus, it makes the code easier to read.
In order to make the above task easier, adding multiple classes to an object helps.
I can give you a simple example to illustrate the point:
<div class="container top left"></div>
<dic class="container bottom right"></div>
When making a media query, I know I can reference the 'top' and 'bottom' and at another viewport, I can reference the 'left' or 'right'. It's just easier to write and remember.
Please note the above may not be convention and is personal preference.
[Note: for those who may be confusing this question with "why not use tables for HTML layout", I am not asking that question. The question I'm asking is why is a grid layout fundamentally different from a table layout.]
I'm researching CSS libraries (in particular Bootstrap) for a project. I am a programmer rather than a web designer and I feel I could benefit from a library that encapsulates good design.
We all know that it's bad practice to use HTML tables to accomplish basic site layout because it mixes presentation with content. One of the benefits provided by CSS libraries like Bootstrap is that they offer the ability to create "grid" layouts without using tables. I'm having a little trouble, however, understanding how their grid layouts differ in any meaningful way from the equivalent table layout.
In other words, what is the fundamental difference between these two examples of HTML? Am I wrong in thinking that the grid layout is simply a table with another name?
<div class="row">
<div class="span16"></div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="span4"></div>
<div class="span4"></div>
<div class="span4"></div>
<div class="span4"></div>
</div>
and
<table>
<tr>
<td colspan=4></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
The difference is that the first example is semantically marked up, assuming the data being marked up is not actually tabular. <table> should only be used for tabular data, not for any data which happens to be displayed in a layout similar to a table.
It is correct though that using CSS packages like Bootstrap, which require you to assign classes to HTML elements which are not semantic but presentational, reduces the separation of content and presentation, making the difference somewhat moot. You should be assigning semantically meaningful classes to your elements and use lesscss mixins (or similar technology) to assign presentational behavior defined in the CSS framework to these classes, instead of assigning the presentational classes to the elements directly.
Say:
<div class="products">
<div class="product"></div>
</div>
.products {
.row;
}
.products > .product {
.span16;
}
Note that I say should. In practice this is not necessarily always the more workable option, but it should be the theoretical goal.
I believe that CBroe comment is the best option, so I chose to clarify it.
Avoid div's. A div should be your last resort, not your first option. Instead, try to use Bootstrap classes on the actual elements. For instance:
<form class="container">
<fieldset class="row">
<label class="span4" for"search">Type your search</label>
<input class="span6" type="text" id="search" />
</fieldset>
</form>
It is a shame to use fieldset to contain a single field, but it is semantically best than using a div for the same thing. The HTML5 standard defines many new container elements, such as article, section, header, footer and many more. In some cases you will have to use div's, but if you minimize it's use then your code will be way more semantic.
The fundamental difference is that you can "reflow" the layout with Bootstrap for different display sizes simply using media queries without needing to change your markup. For example, I can decide that on desktops, I want your 4 divs to be on same row because user has high resolution wide display but on phones I want 2 dives on one row and next divs on next rows. So this way I can adapt my column count in each row using media queries. If you use hard coded HTML tables then it is very difficult to do this.
Having said that, I don't really like bootstrap implementation for the following reasons:
It has breakpoints hard coded in pixels. This means, as phones and tables advance in display resolution, your website may start showing unexpected layouts on those devices. Pixel count is poor proxy for display size.
It limits maximum used display area to 1170px which is again a bummer for users with nice wide displays they can actually use to see more content in your app.
Bootstrap's layout is not source independent, i.e., you can't change column order that is set in HTML. This is however more of a pedantic point.
The default layout is for very small resolution and higher resolution layouts trigger only when media queries fire, which IMO, is a poor choice considering phones will continue to have better resolution and sooner than later your website would have default layout set for outdated mobile devices.
Bootstrap layouts are not truly "worry free" in the sense that you have to read their fine print to see all the bugs and browsers they didn't see worthy of supporting but which you may care about. If you are targeting users in South Korea or China, you would be in for surprise, for example.
So, not everything is gold in bootstrap and their approach is not necessarily always the best possible (as an aside, one other thing I despise in bootstrap is their obsession with so called "jumbotrones" - those real estate wasting inconvenient in-your-face headers - which I hope community doesn't start taking as "new standard"). Personally I use CSS table layout (display:table) these days which has similar benefits as bootstrap without hardcoding <table> in my markup. I can still use media queries to rearrange rows depending on portrait or landscape orientation, for example. However the most important benefit is that my layouts are truly pixel or even percentage independent. For example, in 3 column layout, I let content to decide how much space first and last columns should take. There is no pixel or even percentage width. The center column grabs up all the remaining space (which is good thing for my app, but it may not be for others). In addition, I use ems in media query break points which bootstrap surprisingly doesn't.
I use the Bootstrap grid for page layout, tables for tabular data.
I think of the grid in Bootstrap, not as a grid in the developer sense, like a gridview control, but more in the design page-layout sense - as a grid to contain the page contents. And even though the Bootstrap grid could be also used to create a conventional grid containing tabular data, as deceze pointed out, this kind of grid is better suited for HTML tables - which are still acceptable to use in this scenario.
if you just use tables i think you will miss out on alot of flexibility in re-sizing your document for mobile/tablets without having to make a separate page for each device. once your table structure is defined all you can really do is zoom in and out.
While there's not necessarily much semantic difference between the two sets of markup (since the classes used by Bootstrap's grid system are indeed purely presentational), one very important distinction is that the grid system is much more flexible.
It would be very difficult, for example, to make your table-based layout respond to different screen sizes. There's no way to tell the browser to display one td element below another td in the same row. Whereas with the div example, that's easy to do, and the same markup can be presented in different ways even when the classes are "presentational" in the sense that they define the relative proportions and positioning of the elements on the page.
If I may, I'd like to summarize what I gathered from the other comments and the link explosion I experienced from this page:
The problem with using tables isn't the grid layout, it is the attempt to express it with HTML instead of CSS.
Bootstrap allows grid layouts through (mostly) pure CSS, which is why it is OK. The 'mostly' part comes because your HTML will still be contaminated by your layout data, but more subtly:
<nav class="span4"> ... </nav>
<article class="span8"> ... </article>
This is surely significantly more semantic and maintainable than the old tabular designs, but the 'span4' and 'span8' are still display-data embedded into our HTML. However, since design can never be truly be decoupled from our data (e.g., nested divs), this is a reasonable price to pay.
That being said, even this coupling can be broken, if you use some more modern CSS features provided by a pre-processed language such as LESS. The same example:
<nav id="secondary-nav"> ... </nav>
<article id="main-content"> ... </article>
Coupled with the following LESS:
#secondary-nav{
.span4;
// More styling (padding, etc) if needed
}
#main-content{
.span8;
}
This creates fully decoupled HTML and Stylesheet, which is ideal, because the HTML is cleaner and more readable, and redesigns can be made with less HTML modification. However this only works if you use LESS or some other CSS pre-processor, because CSS currently does not support mixins (AFAIK).
We already use LESS in my workplace, so I know I'll be pushing towards using this type of solution. I'm a very strong believer in semantic HTML and data-design decoupling. :)
Basically DIVs are DIVs & Table elements are simply table elements. The problem with tables is often just keeping track of all of the columns & the rows because it is ultimately a strict data construct. DIVs are far more flexible & forgiving.
For example, if you wanted to to take the four DIVs with the class that equals "span4" and just change them to a 2 column width, all you would need to do is adjust a wee bit of CSS for the outer class "row" and maybe the class "span4". In fact when doing DIVs like this I would avoid calling individual DIVs "span4" or some other number.
My approach would be to create a parent wrapper DIV that is called "rowspan" and the inner DIVs would have some generic ID like maybe "cell".
<div class="rowspan">
<div class="cell"></div>
<div class="cell"></div>
<div class="cell"></div>
<div class="cell"></div>
</div>
Each "cell" class could have a width of 100 pixels for example, and then the parent "rowspan" could be 400 pixels. That would equate to 4 columns in a row. Want to make it 2 columns? No problem! Just change "rowspan" to be 200 pixels wide. At this point it is all in CSS so it's easy to do without rejiggering page structure in the DOM.
But with tables? Not easy. You would have to basically re-render the table with </tr><tr> tags to create new rows.
Version with table, tr, td depends on browser algorithms - wrapping, dynamic width, margins, centering etc.
Version with div can be more easily tuned by css and scripts.
Bootstrap is one of many sites where I have noticed this practice, that to me seems bad but it is widespread enough, and done by people more experienced than me that I think I must be missing something. Take for instance the 2.1.0 version of Bootstrap, if you view source, lines 44-46 (the top of page menu) are these:
<div class="navbar navbar-inverse navbar-fixed-top">
<div class="navbar-inner">
<div class="container">
I understand the associated CSS properties of each class, and the shortcomings of using a framework that is made to be useful to as many people in as many situations as possible but having largely finished a design I am now trying to clean my markup. Is there a reason to use 3 divs when 2 would (from what I can tell) suffice?
While '.container' has a set width, clear properties, and margin settings for centering, I don't understand why '.navbar-inner' is in a separate div from it's parent. It seems like it would make more sense to add it as a class to it's parent div and reduce one layer of nesting.
Is there a reason why I should leave this structure in place (or for that matter something I should incorporate into future coding practices)?
Nesting divs allows you to style and access them separatelly, which can come in handy. But of course it depends on your actual needs, and as you state, a lot can be accomplished just by using css without excess divs.
In most cases you could reduce the complexity of the markup by combining several classes like
<div class="navbar navbar-inverse navbar-fixed-top navbar-inner container">
or
<div class="navbar-inverse-fixed-top-inner-container">
But for that kind of markup to work, you would have to generate quite a lot of CSS rules to satisfy every case.
By separating most use-cases in CSS and with the markup, you end-up with something quite readable and not so heavy on both CSS and HTML sides.
This also allows you to satisfy lots of combinations for a lot of users.
IMHO, the main principle behind that hierarchy is scalability. Because you can easily remove the .container to put something else - or just move it elsewhere. This is only for later use, when you'll read your code again, in 10 years maybe.
Another principle I'd like to point out is encapsulation. If you program in object oriented languages (JS, C++, C#, Java, many others..) then you must be familiar with it.
Based on your example :
<div class="navbar navbar-inverse navbar-fixed-top">
<div class="navbar-inner">
<div class="container">
The .container should not be aware of its container - you seem to agree with that - but nor should the .navbar-inner be aware of its own .navbar state : whether it's fixed, inverse, or not even a navbar.
The .navbar-inner should only serve to provide its children the appropriate behavior, and I think that's why it's best to keep it separated, even if you could mix it with the navbar.
Maybe in some new versions, or just if you want to change the default behavior, there may be conflicts between the navbar and its inner.
Let's try to avoid that and keep the intended structure. It doesn't look so messy anyway...
Thats the way styling (in this case for example width/height, border, margin, padding) works best on different browsers (IE vs. the rest).
I'm trying to work out how I can make my CSS as de-coupled from my HTML as possible. The way to do that would be to write the basic layout elements in the HTML in a standard way, so that different CSS files could know exactly what the mark-up it's working with will look like without having seen it.
So I was wondering if there exist anywhere a set of standards for how you should name your layout elements and what order to put them in. E.g. a sensible way to mark-up my page would be as follows (note that I'm using HTML5 elements and following the theory that you should never use IDs for CSS rules):
<body>
<div class="container"> <!-- central "squeeze" for the content -->
<header>
<img class="logo" />
<nav class="primary"></nav> <!-- main navigation -->
</header>
<aside class="pre"></aside> <!-- left column -->
<article class="main"></article> <!-- central main content -->
<aside class="post"></aside> <!-- right column -->
</div>
</body>
Many pages use something similar to this basic layout. But as you can see, the name of the "container" or "primary" class will vary a lot, as will the use of <aside> for columns. Also, there are probably variances in ordering, like some people would put the <nav> element after the <header> rather than inside it, or the column elements inside the <article> element.
Does anyone know of any work that's been done to standardise the ordering and naming of these commonly used layout elements? Like a microformat or something?
I don't think there is an absolute standard, since no two websites are the same.
Allright, some are, but that's not the point. :)
Anyway, since the CSS is made specifically to markup that single website, you can't actually decouple it in such detail. You won't find some ready made CSS sheets that you can just plugin your website to place all those navigation containers.
I think the best way is to come up with a standard for yourself and stick to it. I hope you would be able to find better names than the often used but quite abstract 'container'. And maybe, some day, it will become the defacto standard.
I'm thinking of using Nathan Smith's 960 Grid System for layout in the ASP.NET MVC site that I'm writing.
I've noticed that all examples of 960.gs usage show HTML that looks like this:
<div class="container_12">
<div class="grid_12">
</div>
<!-- end .grid_12 -->
<div class="clear"></div>
<div class="grid_1">
</div>
<!-- ... -->
</div>
I don't particularly like putting all those grid values inside the HTML itself - it creates clutter and with a lot of content, that can become hard to manage.
Is it possible to somehow put those container and grid values inside an external file that applies grid values based on the id or class attributes of certain tags?
You can't externalize those values. While it would be possible to merge the names into the file such that the names that you designate to the divs are multiple CSS selectors with the grid (i.e.: .sidebar, .grid_3 {...}), this is impractical and makes it nearly impossible to manage and maintain the code. The readability and maintainability that you'd be sacrificing is much more valuable than the semantic goodness that you'd be gaining.
The 960 grid system is pretty ugly on the back end. What you give up in niceness, you gain in simplicity and efficiency of development. Perhaps a different column-based gird system would be better. Consider something like Frame: http://frame.serverboy.net/ (</shameless_plug>) or Blueprint CSS.
Hope this helps.